No one is really clear about the origins of Flamenco: some believe it to have been brought to Spain by gypsy immigrants or gitanos (originally, it is believed, from North India); others believe it to be the music of the Arab peoples left in Spain after the seventeenth-century expulsions of the moors; and others believe it to be a hybrid of several musical traditions surviving on the counter-cultural margins of Spanish cultural life in the late eighteenth century.

Whatever the truth, flamenco deals invariably with the thematics of loss, pain, desire and jealousy. The music is highly stylised, conforming to a system of palos (different flamenco genres such as bulería, tango, rumba or soleá). Each palo has its own rhyhmic pattern (in cycles of 4, 3, 6, or 12 beats), a certain speed and style of delivery. The palosare all usually sung, more often than not accompanied by characteristically virtuosic guitar, and most can also be danced.

The most spectacular and virtuosic of the forms is the bulería, in a 12-beat cycle, and blisteringly fast. The soleá and the siguiriya are slow and mournful, full of intense pathos; the tango is tuneful and lighter, fast and brilliant.